It is interesting that the octopi have quite a different perception of reality than we are accustomed to. If you imagine the divergent paths that evolution may have taken on different planets throughout the galaxy you can have an introduction to the challenges we face as a species if we ever were to encounter a truly alien life form.
Our models of intelligence, perception and personality are limited by our very narrow ideas based upon our feeble attempts to understand each other. We define ourselves as the "most intelligent" and "most social" creatures on our own planet. If we were to meet the seven armed trindoc from Beta Centauri (thank you Larry Niven) we may fail to recognize something that is superior to ourselves.
A Buddhist monk sitting in contemplation of the nature of the universe may appear to be comatose if we were a similarly handicapped species (as ourselves) coming to earth.
We need to enhance our understanding of every living species (or hive mind colony) on our own planet if we are to be anything more than space traveling, xenophobic rubes when we leave our own planet.
I ran into a similar predicament at my former employer. Unbeknownst to me at the time of my interview and hiring there was a significant religious component that developed within the management group. Our Vice President of operations based many of his decisions on who went to "his" church. Of course, none of this was provable but it became increasingly apparent when he would lead us in prayer at the beginning of our managers meetings twice a week. There were two of us who were not "team players" in this regard, a highly respected director and myself (I managed three different departments and had the highest reviews of any of the managers in the operations group).
When it came time for lay-off's, guess who was let go, the director and myself. Eventually the director was re-hired as a consultant. I decided to burn that bridge and when packing my personal effects I threw a notepad at the vice president and told him in a long tirade to get fuxed. Also, I refused to provide any future assistance when they called me later to figure out how to proceed on some of the projects I was working on.
Since this was in a "right to work" state I had little recourse and would not go back, even if they had doubled my salary and given me a public apology. I went on to a different company and made it my personal crusade to steer every customer away from my earlier employer. Sometimes those types of layoffs come back in spades and bite you in the behind.
Religious fanaticism, discriminatory hiring practices and the glass ceiling are still a major problem in many American companies to this day. I guess that you could fight these practices in court but in the long run, do you really want to work for people like this?
Let the best talent go to where we are appreciated and our quirks (religious beliefs, the shoes you wear, your not so politically correct conversation or personal convictions) matter the least. They say that it is a different job marketplace today with companies able to pick and choose who they want. It is a fool who does not hire the most capable and talented individuals because of some personal bias caused by their own ignorance.
I love the idea of beaming power down from space to earth to provide us with electric power. Here are a few problems;
1. For a power source to remain stationary over North America would require a solar array in geostationary orbit (Clarke orbit or Clarke Belt) where we have commercial satellite systems. It is irrelevant to worry about collisions with geostationary satellites as the Clarke belt is approximately 165,000 miles long. The distance from earth is approximately 22,236 miles from earth.
For a closer orbiting solar array it will move across the sky very similar to other satellite systems. Some of the problems with this type of orbit is the significantly higher probability of a collision with existing satellites that would just tear through a solar array (assuming the array is some sort of high-tech solar producing fabric imprinted on mylar. This would degrade solar performance but would usually "kill" or incapacitate the impactor (satellite). Also, being closer to earth, the influences of the planetary geomagnetic forces will damage, short-out or degrade solar system performance over time until performance drops to a few percentage of the initial system capabilities.
2. There are two currently known alternatives for power transfer from space to earth. Microwave energy or space-based laser systems. Since microwave systems are RF systems we need to account for free space losses over distance. This is the same calculation used on terrestrial radio systems. Simplified, the calculation is;
loss = 40+20*Log(r) where r is the distance in kilometers.
What this translates to (roughly) is that around 1:150th of the power sent by the Clarke Orbit solar array would make it to the ground. This does not account for atmospheric losses, alignment issues or the increased losses when the solar array is not directly overhead.
This assumes we can make a very large dish (100 meters across). For a 3.6 Terawatt solar array we would receive around 24 Gigawatts of energy. The rest of the power would be absorbed by the ionosphere, polarization losses, diffraction, and atmospheric heating.
3. Another alternatives would be to use a series of lasers to send the power to earth. Currently our largest CW (continuous wave) lasers can beam about 1 MW of power. (this is a building sized laser). The theoretical power efficiency of a laser may approach 75%, the rest is wasted as heat, RF energy and unrecoverable losses at the laser). To move a Terawatt of power from a solar array would take around 1 million, 1 million watt lasers, all based in space, at a distance where we currently cannot reach with a space shuttle.
Talk about death rays in space. If there was a mis-alignment we could cook big swaths of the earth with a stray laser beam (sort of like standing in a giant microwave oven). These would also generate a significant amount of localized heating and we would need to convert the heat back into electricity (some sort of super solar cell from an old James Bond movie) or some type of Sterling engine operating at the limits of Carnot efficiency.
3. A giant extension cord, this would make copper even more expensive and lead to the removal of millions of miles of wire from people's homes. Heck, if we can string a power cord to the Clarke orbit, let's go with a superconducting space elevator.
I believe that the technological progress to achieve this level of space based solar power system would make the entire NASA budget pale by comparison. Unless we are willing to spend trillions of dollars we will not see a return for decades to come.
As an engineer who has worked through the conceptual, prototyping, type certification, QA/QC, limited manufacturing to full scale manufacturing stages, this should have been corrected back in the QA/QC testing stage and hardware revisions made to the product.
Sadly what has happened over the past few decades is an increased reliance to turn over known problems to "risk managers" who assess the probability of the problem, the impact, the cost to make the design modifications vs. the cost of either "passing the buck" to the customer and then paying off the small minority who press the issue.
The worst nightmare for risk managers is when a problem becomes known to the wider community of customers. Suddenly, their profit calculus flips over on it's head and it turns into fiasco's like this one. I would like to say that this is a rare phenomenon but look at the auto-makers. How many recent model cars have paint peeling off the primer in giant scabs? How many car tires does it take to fail before the cost of paying off the dead or maimed becomes great enough to offset those decisions by risk management?
What is lost is usually not assigned a dollar value. Intangibles like "goodwill" or "customer loyalty" suddenly plummet. Your once loyal customers begin to write their congressmen not to bail out the auto industry because they have made crap for decades.
As engineers, most of us love the challenge of making the most optimal solution to any problem. If we find a real challenge we want to come up with elegant solutions. It is intensely frustrating to be overridden by "bean counters" when you know that a few more days, a few more weeks, another round of testing, can make a product better.
It is the corporate mindset that it is OK to make something with known defects as long as you get your money up front. Executives, stockholders and middle managers all take their compensation packages and cash out as quickly as possible and jump to another ship that they can soon strand in the Saragossa Sea of quick bucks and lack of vision.
Just stewing this over in my brain I was astonished by the possibilities.
Human activity follows a semi-diurnal cycle and in something like a subway station your peak generating capacity would be when masses of people are using the stations, let's say from 6 am to 9 am, 4 pm to 6 pm. Wherever this technology is applied you would need a certain level of foot traffic to make it cost effective.
Imagine this on the floors of airline terminals, sports stadiums, very busy downtown areas (sidewalks in the New York business district). You could even apply this to very busy interstates or near toll plazas.
The real stretch of imagination; think about building seawalls covered in a piezoelectric material where the constant wave action generates electricity. Even wind motion (variable winds, not constant winds where windmills are really the best solution) where you can generate electricity by the loading/unloading of force and strain through a piezoelectric mechanism.
Getting the price-point down low enough can make this an excellent contributor to power generation worldwide. If they covered the grounds around Mecca they could generate megawatts of power during the Haj.
I created a new utility suite based upon the idea that we can go back in time and create the internet before Hitler's rise;
C:\>rping Adolph Hitler -t 12-09-1932/17:32:00
Reverse Pinging Adolph Hitler with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64 Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64 Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64 Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64
Ping statistics for Adolph Hitler:
Mode: Crazier than a shithouse rat
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in years:
Minimum = 76 years, Maximum = 76 years, Average = 76 years
I was going to send a reverse-bootp to his mother and hope he would have been hatched.
I find it miraculous that anyone of us over the age of 40 survived at all. There is so much hype about peanut butter allergies, laundry detergent allergies, supposedly deadly inoculations and the terrible dangers of dust and dirt.
In the 60's and 70's as elementary school students we all ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, played outside, ate dirt (not me but of of my younger siblings did), got scraped up, sunburned, poison ivy/oak/sumac and rolled around in the grass. If the prevalence of terrible medical conditions were so common as they are claimed of today, we would have all died before we were 11 years old.
How many children today are on Ritalin or other behavior modifying medicines? In my childhood if you acted up repeatedly you would be spanked with a belt or a shoe.
There is a common thread through all of this; more and more parents would rather assign some condition, allergy or psychological problem to their children, rather than accepting that their poor parenting skills and lack of oversight is the primary reason on why their children appear to have problems. So let's not get inoculations for our children, after all, smallpox, bubonic plague and malaria are all "natural" and we should live closer to nature.
The "victim" mentality is all pervasive and we are passing it off to our children. Should we really be surprised by the apathy and disconnection of our children from societal structures? This will be our legacy, civilizations who decline to these levels have traditionally collapsed after a few decades.
The entire argument against cloning is coming from well-meaning, do-gooders who for the most part, lack the capacity to understand the implications of cloning. There seems to be this thought that a cloned individual would be lacking in some capacity or held up as a carnival sideshow.
You may recall that back in 1978 the same furor erupted over the idea of a test-tube-baby. Louise Brown was raised as a normal child, had a normal upbringing and has her own family now. I would bet that if you asked her what her opinion is on being a test-tube-baby, she would look you in the eye and wonder how your head is screwed on.
Maybe the fears really revolve around our definition of what is intelligence and the seat of the soul. Intellect, development and the human condition are easy to define. The theocratic's will argue on the state of the soul (an intangible as we know it). To put the brakes on bringing a clone to life because of our fear that they would not have a soul is in the land of isty-misty bogeyman stories.
Cloning, even from an intact cell, should not raise such a visceral reaction, unless there is some belief that this will "steal" a soul from heaven or hell. Cloning of the long dead (even from pieces of DNA re-assembled in a laboratory process) is no different from a theological standpoint.
We are not going to create a "neanderthal park" where people will come and gawk at the nearly human. But we do need to define what is an intelligent being (dolphins, apes, neanderthal's, etc...) before some intelligence comes to our planet and decides that we are amongst the least intelligent on our own planet.
I felt like a dunce with 27/33. Going over the answers it is clear that I was sleeping during the civics class on Jefferson/Davis and have forgotten many aspects of the Gettysburg Address.
This is a question they should have asked;
34. John Brown was famous for;
a) Being the first black astronaut in space
b) Writing the Federalist Papers
c) The actor on "Eight is Enough"
d) Led the raid at Harper's Ferry
e) Running mate of Ross Perot
It has been +20 years since university but some things are ingrained by nuns beating me with rulers.
Pieces, parts and tools have been lost on a very large number of space missions since humanity first went into space. In zero G, if an object has the slightest amount of velocity and it is let go, it quickly is beyond your reach and irrecoverable.
Of course it goes without mention that men lost all of the previous items (including a spatula used to apply a test filler material for the shuttle tiles).
The misogyny of most of the posters to this article helps illustrate an earlier/. article on why fewer women are entering the computer sciences fields in university. Many ego-centric professionals (I use that term loosely) in the IT field still can see no use for a woman in their profession, unless we are staffing a help desk.
EVA missions during space travel are the most challenging and difficult activities of anything that NASA does. "Tim the Toolman" does not have a caddy of accessories to keep his stuff in place. Imagine how difficult it is to be standing on the end of a boom, attached to the shuttle. You have no visual frame of reference, the balance mechanisms in your ears are telling you one thing, your training is telling you something else. Now try to overhaul a bad rotary joint on one of the solar panels.
Ignorance is clearly bliss to several of the posters to this article.
The authors statement about time for love is pedantic. There are numerous literary references from contemporary cultures of the same era on love (sumerians, egyptians, etc...). There are surviving cuneiform tablets of poetry, filled with references to love and adoration that are discovered with quite regularity in Iraq.
The human species of 10,000 years ago and of today are virtually identical in our physical and emotional development.
The differences that brought about "modern" civilization were on agricultural practices where we gradually converted from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to stationary agricultural practices, animal husbandry and permanent communities. Then, as technologies developed (the wheel, the plow, irrigation, pottery, masonry, etc..) we had leisure time to devote to art and literature.
To think that we did not have time for "love" in a harsh environment is to ignore the more contemporary examples such as the Inuit or rain forest peoples where life was very difficult but cohesive families based on love and a sense of belonging have existed for thousands of years.
I do not think there would be a shortage of skilled people who would be excited at the opportunity of being the first to colonize another planet.
You would live your life out on Mars. It would be a hard, difficult and dirty existence, eke out a life for yourself and hopefully your children, eventually to die and be buried under the soil of another planet.
Colonization of other continents and islands have been the greatest adventures. The sailors of the HMS Bounty and Polynesians on Picarin Island found it was a tough place. They had no hope of returning (and many dreaded the idea of facing the hangman's noose).
If I was younger, (to be born in the year 2020), I would do it without reservation.
Again, the point is completely missed. Using Google Apps, users can collaborate on works irrespective of the platform in use. (Windowz, OSX, Linux, phone or gaming platform)
Microsoft is going to roll an exclusively Windows solution for the Windows OS. If it bears any semblance to their previous efforts in collaborative groupware it will be irrelevant.
Over the past 20 years, NASA seems to have recurrent problems with poor project management, inadequate contractor oversight and indecisive leadership. Much of this comes from being forced to play politics and jump through the new hoops of every different administration.
NASA needs to be given a mandate by congress to keep the organization focused on it's primary objectives; space exploration, the manned space initiative and moving our nation forward to the planets. It seems that once we hit the moon with the Apollo program we fell back, exhausted, and decided to build a space dump-truck (shuttle) and the occasional planetary probe.
NASA has been distracted by other sciences (clean energy, atmospheric modeling, mapping, etc..) What we seem to forget that there is an abundance of other federal agencies that are tasked with the same responsibilities (DOE, Department of Energy), (NOAA, weather and a bunch of other things) and the USGS.
If NASA has the means to piggyback a science mission on one if it's primary duties (space exploration) that is fine. NASA should not be the lead agency on anything that has the word "science" in the title. As a regular subscriber to "NASA Tech Briefs" I can see the emphasis to push their work down to commercial (profitable) applications that are far removed from space sciences.
NASA has been the catch-all for anything technical that every agency, political entity or commercial interest that wanted a piece of the NASA financial pie.
You may be familiar with the description of being able to do one or two things really well or dong everything badly. NASA has fallen into this trap and now spends all of it's time, trying to serve too many masters.
Exactly, I am a propagation engineer and have been working through this very challenge for 20+ years. There are a multitude of commercially available products out there to create an area coverage.
I use TAP (Terrain Analysis Program) and it is quite expensive ($20 K with all of the bells and whistles). Almost all of the data sources I use are available at no cost. LULC (land use,land classification) for vegetation types I modified TIA TR8 (revised) to calculate vegetation losses more accurately into the GHz spectrum.
There are several different propagation models and each has it's own advantages and disadvantages; Longley-Rice, Bullington, Okumura, Okumura-Hata-Davidson, etc.
Generally I can get accurate results around 90% but you need to also incorporate rain attenuation losses using the Mendhurst, Ryde, CCIR or Crane methods. Atmospheric absorption losses, climate (thermal noise) and terrain roughness.
With WiFi you can never be certain what the antenna polarization will be of the end device (horizontal or vertical), depending upon how the device is held, this can introduce an additional 20 dB of losses).
Base station antennas have specific radiation patterns and nulls, reflections off of structures (multipath) can be additive or subtractive. Knife edge diffraction can cause problems. Even the polarization of trees (trunks are usually vertically polarized, branches are usually horizontally polarized). All of these things are potential losses.
A propagation model will give you some idea on if a system will work. It is no replacement for field testing. To depend solely upon any software propagation tool is a recipe for dead spots and project creep (when you suddenly find out you need 30% more Access Points and you have committed to a certain service level to the customer).
If you want to give it a try, download the demo of TAP from SoftWright http://www.softwright.com/ it will only work in the Denver area but you can try some of the tools out for path analysis, coverage studies, area coverage (best server, aggregate networks), Inter-modulation, antenna patterns and the losses/ gains of transmitters, receivers, antennas and feedlines.
BTW, I am just a customer. I have no vested interest in SoftWright or TAP.
For most species survival of extreme conditions is not the same thing as flourishing. This is a very interesting experiment and does open up quite a few possibilities for future research.
If scientists were attempting to encourage beneficial mutations to make it more likely to survive a space environment this can be done on the ground, in a laboratory. It is not difficult to create a vacuum environment, bathe it with UV light and high energy particle and put a petri dish in the middle of this environment.
To me it all smacks of the comic book and recent movies of "The Fantastic Four". Superior powers and prowess does not appear suddenly when exposed to some variant of radiation from space. In most cases, biological life-forms either 1). Die, 99.999% the time 2). Mutate, leaving a sickly, short-lived organism 3). Mutate but in an unexpected manner.
Scientists have been doing this sort of research of a century. It is the basis of many vaccines. (live-attenuated).
From this we could end up with a bacteria that would tolerate a near-space environment like mars with it's much diminished atmosphere and non-existent geomagnetic field. But what have we accomplished in the end?
Can we say that we created a bacteria that contaminated... err, colonized a different planet? I wonder if the same thought was in the head of primitive man when he threw the first coconut stuffed with a note in it, into the Pacific ocean.
This should be fairly easy to verify. We have space probes (Voyagers and Pioneers) that are at significant distances from the sun. One Voyager has even crossed out of the direct influence of the sun and into interstellar space.
These probes were equipped with RTG's (Radio-ThermoElectric-Generators) that use Plutonium 239 as a heat source to generate electrical power for the probe. As these have been moving away from the sun for 25+ years we should be able to detect the differences in decay rates (depending upon the instrumentation on the RTG's).
Over the past 30 years NASA has had a tendency to make every space mission into a swiss army knife.
They start with a good concept, something fast, lift a bunch of load, explore a certain mystery, then the NASA centers get involved and everyone tries to tack on their pet project;
Let's put a modern whiz-bang toilet on the space shuttle.
ISS needs two arms, you know, one is just not good enough.
Lets launch the crappy solar panels first and then we will go put up the good ones later.
Well, the optics look right, we don't need to test the telescope out on the ground.
Metric of Imperial Units of measure? Heck, it's space we will be close enough.
Look back at the original concept for Orion, then look at what it expected to be now. They have pimped out the ride and hung a few thousand more pounds of flash.
Give NASA five more years and the Orion will barely make it into orbit but my, it will look pretty with the Mercedes Benz dashboard bling.
Next, the police will be picking people off the streets for prostitution. A girl is walking from church to her grandmothers house, minding her own business. The police arrest her and charge her with "making available" on a prostitution charge. I can see it in court;
"well, your honor, she was wearing a sun-dress and makeup, and you know what sort of girls those are." the judge, "ah, I see your point, we don't have to prove that she was giving BJ's in the back of a car, just that she was "making it available. GUILTY ON ALL CHARGES!"
Why can't a radio station be charged with "making available? Hell, anyone can pull out a tape recorder. OMG, I hummed a song earlier today! What if someone heard me and downloaded music because of it. Can they charge me??
This is spinning wildly out of control. The record companies must have a 20:1 ratio of lawyers to artists. Maybe they need just open a class action lawsuit against every American since we are all engaged in a conspiracy against them.
RIAA, be careful what you ask for. Maybe someday there will be a revolution and the RIAA lawyers will be lined up against the wall.
"And that one in the spotlight, he don't look right to me. Get him up against the wall. -- 'Gainst the wall!"
I understand the need to make educational opportunities available to every child. I even understand the necessity of dragging, kicking and screaming, every illiterate, ignorant savage up to a level of competence where they can function as productive members of society. What I take umbrage with is the measurement of success of this goal is the percentage of students passing a standardized testing regimen.
Schools are "teaching the tests" and not the underlying analytical skills or background knowledge that makes it possible to "figure it out". We are turning out large numbers of parrots who can mimic true education by spewing out the correct multiple-choice answer to a list of well rehearsed questions. This makes a mockery of education by taking it down to the level of a certification mill where you can go for a few days to jam for a Cisco or a Microsoft cert.
As a top-end student in high school and university (electrical engineering) I was fortunate enough to still have an education based upon the fundamentals of thinking and not memorizing. I see the products of our modern educational system today. Folks who may have a BSEE but cannot troubleshoot a problem. Troubleshooting is an good indicator of a solid understanding of processes and the background theory as you need to apply these in a logical, consistent manner to come to a solution.
We are a nation that is quickly becoming ill prepared to be a technological leader in the future. Most Americans will be well suited for a food service job, landscaping or working in a coal mine.
It seems that some people confuse a molecule (water) with atoms (oxygen and hydrogen).
We split molecules all the time, it's a natural process of every form of biology and chemistry. Cells derive their energy process through the splitting (or changes) of molecules. Sometimes you gain energy through the split (like fire) and sometimes you lose energy (chemical cold packs when water and ammonium nitrate combine).
In atoms, some atoms can split (fission) with a release of energy. Other atoms will fission when additional energy is added.
Read "economic fairness" as "It's unfair to our economics when someone can get a program for free when they should pay us for an equivalent.
How many closed, commercial projects met an early death when the manufacturer decided to drop the software? How many users were left stranded, without a way to open files, complete projects or enjoy their previous investments? Their only choice was to PAY again for a different product to do the same thing they were doing two years ago.
The warped business model of Microsoft is like taxes. You pay and pay until you die, then your family cannot even enjoy what you had paid for as the license would not be transferable.
Still, to this day they do not understand what is going on. Sometimes people are creative because they love what they are doing. They want others to see their cool work and to recognize their efforts. Not always because they want to dump their work over to a cold, dispassionate corporation and let it be sold over and over again to a captive installed base.
Fifty years from now I suspect we will look back at this time as a fluke, when big business was squeezing us dry for software. Our grandchildren will look back and wonder how did we ever overcome the stifling limitations on creativity.
True, a nuclear weapon will leave radioactivity and this can be detected readily. Unfortunately we are still living in a world where submarines, bombers and missiles are pointed from country to country like loaded shotguns on a hair trigger.
My fear is that someone would mis-interpret an incoming meteor as a nuclear weapon and initiate a launch on their perceived threats.
If Moscow, Washington DC, Beijing or London were wiped out in a meteorite strike that was not detected before the destruction. Do you think that missile forces would not be put on high alert?
We are not that far away from the days of "Fail Safe".
I have been following this team's progress with their investigation since it first came to light last year on the slash. They present a compelling case that there may be an impact body that created the lake.
I can't wait and see their results from core drilling the lake.
There have been several other impacts that were recorded by mankind (one in Estonia, recorded by Pliny the Younger).
The Tunguska event could be mis-interpreted as a nuclear strike if it were to happen today over a populated area. We need to increase our understanding of the frequency and effects of bolide impacts upon our planet.
What would happen if all of your standard office applications could be on-line? I imagine there are not many people who create an account in Outlook to look at GMail. The Gmail interface is usually good enough to do-away with a mailer program like Outlook.
There are dangerous times for companies like Microsoft. Embedded Linux kernel's on motherboards, web applications that cut into the Office suite of applications, Open Office (free for God's sake!).
Over the years, Microsoft has a demonstrated a track-record of buying up these companies and their dangerous ideas. This behavior is similar to that of a drowning man, pulling his rescuer under the water.
Slashdot Mirror
It is interesting that the octopi have quite a different perception of reality than we are accustomed to. If you imagine the divergent paths that evolution may have taken on different planets throughout the galaxy you can have an introduction to the challenges we face as a species if we ever were to encounter a truly alien life form.
Our models of intelligence, perception and personality are limited by our very narrow ideas based upon our feeble attempts to understand each other. We define ourselves as the "most intelligent" and "most social" creatures on our own planet. If we were to meet the seven armed trindoc from Beta Centauri (thank you Larry Niven) we may fail to recognize something that is superior to ourselves.
A Buddhist monk sitting in contemplation of the nature of the universe may appear to be comatose if we were a similarly handicapped species (as ourselves) coming to earth.
We need to enhance our understanding of every living species (or hive mind colony) on our own planet if we are to be anything more than space traveling, xenophobic rubes when we leave our own planet.
I ran into a similar predicament at my former employer. Unbeknownst to me at the time of my interview and hiring there was a significant religious component that developed within the management group.
Our Vice President of operations based many of his decisions on who went to "his" church. Of course, none of this was provable but it became increasingly apparent when he would lead us in prayer at the beginning of our managers meetings twice a week. There were two of us who were not "team players" in this regard, a highly respected director and myself (I managed three different departments and had the highest reviews of any of the managers in the operations group).
When it came time for lay-off's, guess who was let go, the director and myself. Eventually the director was re-hired as a consultant. I decided to burn that bridge and when packing my personal effects I threw a notepad at the vice president and told him in a long tirade to get fuxed. Also, I refused to provide any future assistance when they called me later to figure out how to proceed on some of the projects I was working on.
Since this was in a "right to work" state I had little recourse and would not go back, even if they had doubled my salary and given me a public apology. I went on to a different company and made it my personal crusade to steer every customer away from my earlier employer. Sometimes those types of layoffs come back in spades and bite you in the behind.
Religious fanaticism, discriminatory hiring practices and the glass ceiling are still a major problem in many American companies to this day. I guess that you could fight these practices in court but in the long run, do you really want to work for people like this?
Let the best talent go to where we are appreciated and our quirks (religious beliefs, the shoes you wear, your not so politically correct conversation or personal convictions) matter the least. They say that it is a different job marketplace today with companies able to pick and choose who they want. It is a fool who does not hire the most capable and talented individuals because of some personal bias caused by their own ignorance.
I love the idea of beaming power down from space to earth to provide us with electric power. Here are a few problems;
1. For a power source to remain stationary over North America would require a solar array in geostationary orbit (Clarke orbit or Clarke Belt) where we have commercial satellite systems. It is irrelevant to worry about collisions with geostationary satellites as the Clarke belt is approximately 165,000 miles long. The distance from earth is approximately 22,236 miles from earth.
For a closer orbiting solar array it will move across the sky very similar to other satellite systems. Some of the problems with this type of orbit is the significantly higher probability of a collision with existing satellites that would just tear through a solar array (assuming the array is some sort of high-tech solar producing fabric imprinted on mylar. This would degrade solar performance but would usually "kill" or incapacitate the impactor (satellite). Also, being closer to earth, the influences of the planetary geomagnetic forces will damage, short-out or degrade solar system performance over time until performance drops to a few percentage of the initial system capabilities.
2. There are two currently known alternatives for power transfer from space to earth. Microwave energy or space-based laser systems. Since microwave systems are RF systems we need to account for free space losses over distance. This is the same calculation used on terrestrial radio systems. Simplified, the calculation is;
loss = 40+20*Log(r) where r is the distance in kilometers.
What this translates to (roughly) is that around 1:150th of the power sent by the Clarke Orbit solar array would make it to the ground. This does not account for atmospheric losses, alignment issues or the increased losses when the solar array is not directly overhead.
This assumes we can make a very large dish (100 meters across). For a 3.6 Terawatt solar array we would receive around 24 Gigawatts of energy. The rest of the power would be absorbed by the ionosphere, polarization losses, diffraction, and atmospheric heating.
3. Another alternatives would be to use a series of lasers to send the power to earth. Currently our largest CW (continuous wave) lasers can beam about 1 MW of power. (this is a building sized laser). The theoretical power efficiency of a laser may approach 75%, the rest is wasted as heat, RF energy and unrecoverable losses at the laser). To move a Terawatt of power from a solar array would take around 1 million, 1 million watt lasers, all based in space, at a distance where we currently cannot reach with a space shuttle.
Talk about death rays in space. If there was a mis-alignment we could cook big swaths of the earth with a stray laser beam (sort of like standing in a giant microwave oven). These would also generate a significant amount of localized heating and we would need to convert the heat back into electricity (some sort of super solar cell from an old James Bond movie) or some type of Sterling engine operating at the limits of Carnot efficiency.
3. A giant extension cord, this would make copper even more expensive and lead to the removal of millions of miles of wire from people's homes. Heck, if we can string a power cord to the Clarke orbit, let's go with a superconducting space elevator.
I believe that the technological progress to achieve this level of space based solar power system would make the entire NASA budget pale by comparison. Unless we are willing to spend trillions of dollars we will not see a return for decades to come.
As an engineer who has worked through the conceptual, prototyping, type certification, QA/QC, limited manufacturing to full scale manufacturing stages, this should have been corrected back in the QA/QC testing stage and hardware revisions made to the product.
Sadly what has happened over the past few decades is an increased reliance to turn over known problems to "risk managers" who assess the probability of the problem, the impact, the cost to make the design modifications vs. the cost of either "passing the buck" to the customer and then paying off the small minority who press the issue.
The worst nightmare for risk managers is when a problem becomes known to the wider community of customers. Suddenly, their profit calculus flips over on it's head and it turns into fiasco's like this one. I would like to say that this is a rare phenomenon but look at the auto-makers. How many recent model cars have paint peeling off the primer in giant scabs? How many car tires does it take to fail before the cost of paying off the dead or maimed becomes great enough to offset those decisions by risk management?
What is lost is usually not assigned a dollar value. Intangibles like "goodwill" or "customer loyalty" suddenly plummet. Your once loyal customers begin to write their congressmen not to bail out the auto industry because they have made crap for decades.
As engineers, most of us love the challenge of making the most optimal solution to any problem. If we find a real challenge we want to come up with elegant solutions. It is intensely frustrating to be overridden by "bean counters" when you know that a few more days, a few more weeks, another round of testing, can make a product better.
It is the corporate mindset that it is OK to make something with known defects as long as you get your money up front. Executives, stockholders and middle managers all take their compensation packages and cash out as quickly as possible and jump to another ship that they can soon strand in the Saragossa Sea of quick bucks and lack of vision.
Just stewing this over in my brain I was astonished by the possibilities.
Human activity follows a semi-diurnal cycle and in something like a subway station your peak generating capacity would be when masses of people are using the stations, let's say from 6 am to 9 am, 4 pm to 6 pm. Wherever this technology is applied you would need a certain level of foot traffic to make it cost effective.
Imagine this on the floors of airline terminals, sports stadiums, very busy downtown areas (sidewalks in the New York business district). You could even apply this to very busy interstates or near toll plazas.
The real stretch of imagination; think about building seawalls covered in a piezoelectric material where the constant wave action generates electricity. Even wind motion (variable winds, not constant winds where windmills are really the best solution) where you can generate electricity by the loading/unloading of force and strain through a piezoelectric mechanism.
Getting the price-point down low enough can make this an excellent contributor to power generation worldwide. If they covered the grounds around Mecca they could generate megawatts of power during the Haj.
I created a new utility suite based upon the idea that we can go back in time and create the internet before Hitler's rise;
C:\>rping Adolph Hitler -t 12-09-1932/17:32:00
Reverse Pinging Adolph Hitler with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64
Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64
Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64
Reply from Adolph Hitler: bytes=32 time=76 years, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0.000 secods TTL=64
Ping statistics for Adolph Hitler:
Mode: Crazier than a shithouse rat
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in years:
Minimum = 76 years, Maximum = 76 years, Average = 76 years
I was going to send a reverse-bootp to his mother and hope he would have been hatched.
I find it miraculous that anyone of us over the age of 40 survived at all. There is so much hype about peanut butter allergies, laundry detergent allergies, supposedly deadly inoculations and the terrible dangers of dust and dirt.
In the 60's and 70's as elementary school students we all ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, played outside, ate dirt (not me but of of my younger siblings did), got scraped up, sunburned, poison ivy/oak/sumac and rolled around in the grass. If the prevalence of terrible medical conditions were so common as they are claimed of today, we would have all died before we were 11 years old.
How many children today are on Ritalin or other behavior modifying medicines? In my childhood if you acted up repeatedly you would be spanked with a belt or a shoe.
There is a common thread through all of this; more and more parents would rather assign some condition, allergy or psychological problem to their children, rather than accepting that their poor parenting skills and lack of oversight is the primary reason on why their children appear to have problems. So let's not get inoculations for our children, after all, smallpox, bubonic plague and malaria are all "natural" and we should live closer to nature.
The "victim" mentality is all pervasive and we are passing it off to our children. Should we really be surprised by the apathy and disconnection of our children from societal structures? This will be our legacy, civilizations who decline to these levels have traditionally collapsed after a few decades.
The entire argument against cloning is coming from well-meaning, do-gooders who for the most part, lack the capacity to understand the implications of cloning. There seems to be this thought that a cloned individual would be lacking in some capacity or held up as a carnival sideshow.
You may recall that back in 1978 the same furor erupted over the idea of a test-tube-baby. Louise Brown was raised as a normal child, had a normal upbringing and has her own family now. I would bet that if you asked her what her opinion is on being a test-tube-baby, she would look you in the eye and wonder how your head is screwed on.
Maybe the fears really revolve around our definition of what is intelligence and the seat of the soul. Intellect, development and the human condition are easy to define. The theocratic's will argue on the state of the soul (an intangible as we know it). To put the brakes on bringing a clone to life because of our fear that they would not have a soul is in the land of isty-misty bogeyman stories.
Cloning, even from an intact cell, should not raise such a visceral reaction, unless there is some belief that this will "steal" a soul from heaven or hell. Cloning of the long dead (even from pieces of DNA re-assembled in a laboratory process) is no different from a theological standpoint.
We are not going to create a "neanderthal park" where people will come and gawk at the nearly human. But we do need to define what is an intelligent being (dolphins, apes, neanderthal's, etc...) before some intelligence comes to our planet and decides that we are amongst the least intelligent on our own planet.
I felt like a dunce with 27/33. Going over the answers it is clear that I was sleeping during the civics class on Jefferson/Davis and have forgotten many aspects of the Gettysburg Address.
This is a question they should have asked;
34. John Brown was famous for;
a) Being the first black astronaut in space
b) Writing the Federalist Papers
c) The actor on "Eight is Enough"
d) Led the raid at Harper's Ferry
e) Running mate of Ross Perot
It has been +20 years since university but some things are ingrained by nuns beating me with rulers.
Pieces, parts and tools have been lost on a very large number of space missions since humanity first went into space. In zero G, if an object has the slightest amount of velocity and it is let go, it quickly is beyond your reach and irrecoverable.
Of course it goes without mention that men lost all of the previous items (including a spatula used to apply a test filler material for the shuttle tiles).
The misogyny of most of the posters to this article helps illustrate an earlier /. article on why fewer women are entering the computer sciences fields in university. Many ego-centric professionals (I use that term loosely) in the IT field still can see no use for a woman in their profession, unless we are staffing a help desk.
EVA missions during space travel are the most challenging and difficult activities of anything that NASA does. "Tim the Toolman" does not have a caddy of accessories to keep his stuff in place. Imagine how difficult it is to be standing on the end of a boom, attached to the shuttle. You have no visual frame of reference, the balance mechanisms in your ears are telling you one thing, your training is telling you something else. Now try to overhaul a bad rotary joint on one of the solar panels.
Ignorance is clearly bliss to several of the posters to this article.
The authors statement about time for love is pedantic. There are numerous literary references from contemporary cultures of the same era on love (sumerians, egyptians, etc...). There are surviving cuneiform tablets of poetry, filled with references to love and adoration that are discovered with quite regularity in Iraq.
The human species of 10,000 years ago and of today are virtually identical in our physical and emotional development.
The differences that brought about "modern" civilization were on agricultural practices where we gradually converted from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to stationary agricultural practices, animal husbandry and permanent communities. Then, as technologies developed (the wheel, the plow, irrigation, pottery, masonry, etc..) we had leisure time to devote to art and literature.
To think that we did not have time for "love" in a harsh environment is to ignore the more contemporary examples such as the Inuit or rain forest peoples where life was very difficult but cohesive families based on love and a sense of belonging have existed for thousands of years.
I do not think there would be a shortage of skilled people who would be excited at the opportunity of being the first to colonize another planet.
You would live your life out on Mars. It would be a hard, difficult and dirty existence, eke out a life for yourself and hopefully your children, eventually to die and be buried under the soil of another planet.
Colonization of other continents and islands have been the greatest adventures. The sailors of the HMS Bounty and Polynesians on Picarin Island found it was a tough place. They had no hope of returning (and many dreaded the idea of facing the hangman's noose).
If I was younger, (to be born in the year 2020), I would do it without reservation.
Again, the point is completely missed. Using Google Apps, users can collaborate on works irrespective of the platform in use. (Windowz, OSX, Linux, phone or gaming platform)
Microsoft is going to roll an exclusively Windows solution for the Windows OS. If it bears any semblance to their previous efforts in collaborative groupware it will be irrelevant.
Over the past 20 years, NASA seems to have recurrent problems with poor project management, inadequate contractor oversight and indecisive leadership. Much of this comes from being forced to play politics and jump through the new hoops of every different administration.
NASA needs to be given a mandate by congress to keep the organization focused on it's primary objectives; space exploration, the manned space initiative and moving our nation forward to the planets. It seems that once we hit the moon with the Apollo program we fell back, exhausted, and decided to build a space dump-truck (shuttle) and the occasional planetary probe.
NASA has been distracted by other sciences (clean energy, atmospheric modeling, mapping, etc..) What we seem to forget that there is an abundance of other federal agencies that are tasked with the same responsibilities (DOE, Department of Energy), (NOAA, weather and a bunch of other things) and the USGS.
If NASA has the means to piggyback a science mission on one if it's primary duties (space exploration) that is fine. NASA should not be the lead agency on anything that has the word "science" in the title. As a regular subscriber to "NASA Tech Briefs" I can see the emphasis to push their work down to commercial (profitable) applications that are far removed from space sciences.
NASA has been the catch-all for anything technical that every agency, political entity or commercial interest that wanted a piece of the NASA financial pie.
You may be familiar with the description of being able to do one or two things really well or dong everything badly. NASA has fallen into this trap and now spends all of it's time, trying to serve too many masters.
Exactly, I am a propagation engineer and have been working through this very challenge for 20+ years. There are a multitude of commercially available products out there to create an area coverage.
I use TAP (Terrain Analysis Program) and it is quite expensive ($20 K with all of the bells and whistles). Almost all of the data sources I use are available at no cost. LULC (land use,land classification) for vegetation types I modified TIA TR8 (revised) to calculate vegetation losses more accurately into the GHz spectrum.
Terrain data in the Shapefile format is available at http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/viewer.htm. I even pull down SRTM (Shuttle Radar Tomography Mission) data for elevation info.
There are several different propagation models and each has it's own advantages and disadvantages; Longley-Rice, Bullington, Okumura, Okumura-Hata-Davidson, etc.
Generally I can get accurate results around 90% but you need to also incorporate rain attenuation losses using the Mendhurst, Ryde, CCIR or Crane methods. Atmospheric absorption losses, climate (thermal noise) and terrain roughness.
With WiFi you can never be certain what the antenna polarization will be of the end device (horizontal or vertical), depending upon how the device is held, this can introduce an additional 20 dB of losses).
Base station antennas have specific radiation patterns and nulls, reflections off of structures (multipath) can be additive or subtractive. Knife edge diffraction can cause problems. Even the polarization of trees (trunks are usually vertically polarized, branches are usually horizontally polarized). All of these things are potential losses.
A propagation model will give you some idea on if a system will work. It is no replacement for field testing. To depend solely upon any software propagation tool is a recipe for dead spots and project creep (when you suddenly find out you need 30% more Access Points and you have committed to a certain service level to the customer).
If you want to give it a try, download the demo of TAP from SoftWright http://www.softwright.com/ it will only work in the Denver area but you can try some of the tools out for path analysis, coverage studies, area coverage (best server, aggregate networks), Inter-modulation, antenna patterns and the losses/ gains of transmitters, receivers, antennas and feedlines.
BTW, I am just a customer. I have no vested interest in SoftWright or TAP.
For most species survival of extreme conditions is not the same thing as flourishing. This is a very interesting experiment and does open up quite a few possibilities for future research.
If scientists were attempting to encourage beneficial mutations to make it more likely to survive a space environment this can be done on the ground, in a laboratory. It is not difficult to create a vacuum environment, bathe it with UV light and high energy particle and put a petri dish in the middle of this environment.
To me it all smacks of the comic book and recent movies of "The Fantastic Four". Superior powers and prowess does not appear suddenly when exposed to some variant of radiation from space. In most cases, biological life-forms either 1). Die, 99.999% the time 2). Mutate, leaving a sickly, short-lived organism 3). Mutate but in an unexpected manner.
Scientists have been doing this sort of research of a century. It is the basis of many vaccines. (live-attenuated).
From this we could end up with a bacteria that would tolerate a near-space environment like mars with it's much diminished atmosphere and non-existent geomagnetic field. But what have we accomplished in the end?
Can we say that we created a bacteria that contaminated... err, colonized a different planet? I wonder if the same thought was in the head of primitive man when he threw the first coconut stuffed with a note in it, into the Pacific ocean.
This should be fairly easy to verify. We have space probes (Voyagers and Pioneers) that are at significant distances from the sun. One Voyager has even crossed out of the direct influence of the sun and into interstellar space.
These probes were equipped with RTG's (Radio-ThermoElectric-Generators) that use Plutonium 239 as a heat source to generate electrical power for the probe. As these have been moving away from the sun for 25+ years we should be able to detect the differences in decay rates (depending upon the instrumentation on the RTG's).
Over the past 30 years NASA has had a tendency to make every space mission into a swiss army knife.
They start with a good concept, something fast, lift a bunch of load, explore a certain mystery, then the NASA centers get involved and everyone tries to tack on their pet project;
Let's put a modern whiz-bang toilet on the space shuttle.
ISS needs two arms, you know, one is just not good enough.
Lets launch the crappy solar panels first and then we will go put up the good ones later.
Well, the optics look right, we don't need to test the telescope out on the ground.
Metric of Imperial Units of measure? Heck, it's space we will be close enough.
Look back at the original concept for Orion, then look at what it expected to be now. They have pimped out the ride and hung a few thousand more pounds of flash.
Give NASA five more years and the Orion will barely make it into orbit but my, it will look pretty with the Mercedes Benz dashboard bling.
Next, the police will be picking people off the streets for prostitution. A girl is walking from church to her grandmothers house, minding her own business. The police arrest her and charge her with "making available" on a prostitution charge. I can see it in court;
"well, your honor, she was wearing a sun-dress and makeup, and you know what sort of girls those are." the judge, "ah, I see your point, we don't have to prove that she was giving BJ's in the back of a car, just that she was "making it available. GUILTY ON ALL CHARGES!"
Why can't a radio station be charged with "making available? Hell, anyone can pull out a tape recorder. OMG, I hummed a song earlier today! What if someone heard me and downloaded music because of it. Can they charge me??
This is spinning wildly out of control. The record companies must have a 20:1 ratio of lawyers to artists. Maybe they need just open a class action lawsuit against every American since we are all engaged in a conspiracy against them.
RIAA, be careful what you ask for. Maybe someday there will be a revolution and the RIAA lawyers will be lined up against the wall.
"And that one in the spotlight, he don't look right to me. Get him up against the wall. -- 'Gainst the wall!"
I understand the need to make educational opportunities available to every child. I even understand the necessity of dragging, kicking and screaming, every illiterate, ignorant savage up to a level of competence where they can function as productive members of society. What I take umbrage with is the measurement of success of this goal is the percentage of students passing a standardized testing regimen.
Schools are "teaching the tests" and not the underlying analytical skills or background knowledge that makes it possible to "figure it out". We are turning out large numbers of parrots who can mimic true education by spewing out the correct multiple-choice answer to a list of well rehearsed questions. This makes a mockery of education by taking it down to the level of a certification mill where you can go for a few days to jam for a Cisco or a Microsoft cert.
As a top-end student in high school and university (electrical engineering) I was fortunate enough to still have an education based upon the fundamentals of thinking and not memorizing. I see the products of our modern educational system today. Folks who may have a BSEE but cannot troubleshoot a problem. Troubleshooting is an good indicator of a solid understanding of processes and the background theory as you need to apply these in a logical, consistent manner to come to a solution.
We are a nation that is quickly becoming ill prepared to be a technological leader in the future. Most Americans will be well suited for a food service job, landscaping or working in a coal mine.
It seems that some people confuse a molecule (water) with atoms (oxygen and hydrogen).
We split molecules all the time, it's a natural process of every form of biology and chemistry. Cells derive their energy process through the splitting (or changes) of molecules. Sometimes you gain energy through the split (like fire) and sometimes you lose energy (chemical cold packs when water and ammonium nitrate combine).
In atoms, some atoms can split (fission) with a release of energy. Other atoms will fission when additional energy is added.
Read "economic fairness" as "It's unfair to our economics when someone can get a program for free when they should pay us for an equivalent.
How many closed, commercial projects met an early death when the manufacturer decided to drop the software? How many users were left stranded, without a way to open files, complete projects or enjoy their previous investments? Their only choice was to PAY again for a different product to do the same thing they were doing two years ago.
The warped business model of Microsoft is like taxes. You pay and pay until you die, then your family cannot even enjoy what you had paid for as the license would not be transferable.
Still, to this day they do not understand what is going on. Sometimes people are creative because they love what they are doing. They want others to see their cool work and to recognize their efforts. Not always because they want to dump their work over to a cold, dispassionate corporation and let it be sold over and over again to a captive installed base.
Fifty years from now I suspect we will look back at this time as a fluke, when big business was squeezing us dry for software. Our grandchildren will look back and wonder how did we ever overcome the stifling limitations on creativity.
True, a nuclear weapon will leave radioactivity and this can be detected readily. Unfortunately we are still living in a world where submarines, bombers and missiles are pointed from country to country like loaded shotguns on a hair trigger.
My fear is that someone would mis-interpret an incoming meteor as a nuclear weapon and initiate a launch on their perceived threats.
If Moscow, Washington DC, Beijing or London were wiped out in a meteorite strike that was not detected before the destruction. Do you think that missile forces would not be put on high alert?
We are not that far away from the days of "Fail Safe".
I have been following this team's progress with their investigation since it first came to light last year on the slash. They present a compelling case that there may be an impact body that created the lake.
I can't wait and see their results from core drilling the lake.
There have been several other impacts that were recorded by mankind (one in Estonia, recorded by Pliny the Younger).
The Tunguska event could be mis-interpreted as a nuclear strike if it were to happen today over a populated area. We need to increase our understanding of the frequency and effects of bolide impacts upon our planet.
Microsoft fears Google and companies like it.
What would happen if all of your standard office applications could be on-line? I imagine there are not many people who create an account in Outlook to look at GMail. The Gmail interface is usually good enough to do-away with a mailer program like Outlook.
There are dangerous times for companies like Microsoft. Embedded Linux kernel's on motherboards, web applications that cut into the Office suite of applications, Open Office (free for God's sake!).
Over the years, Microsoft has a demonstrated a track-record of buying up these companies and their dangerous ideas. This behavior is similar to that of a drowning man, pulling his rescuer under the water.